Politics of Space Through Intersectional Feminist Perspectives: From learning to acting.

The paper discusses the outcomes of an interdisciplinary research project funded through the Vice-Chancellor Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Fund at Northumbria University. The project engaged students and staff in site-specific performances, conversations and workshops, exploring how our built spaces replicate gendered paradigms in male dominated working cultures and proposing tactics to subvert these through radical and intersectional feminist approaches. “Space” is the object for cross-disciplinary discussion, where tangible and intangible expressions of power converge to establish or restate intersectional inequalities. Through this lens, “Empowered bodies” aimed to explore the relationship between the built environment, gender and bodily autonomy, critiquing issues arising from biased social constructs in HE and gender stereotypes. To (re)define the field of our spatial agency, we first questioned how to challenge gender stereotypes in making spaces, focussing on two pioneering feminist pedagogical experiences at Manchester School of Architecture (UK) and The Department of Architecture in Florence (Italy). We then developed a collective reflection on how to move from learning to acting in the politics of space, arguing that a deeply interdisciplinary approach to space is necessary to take action. During the final stage of the project we invited artists to (re)appropriate spaces of everyday life through site-specific performances, reflecting upon the idea of reclaiming spaces through their bodily autonomy and identifying tangible and intangible expressions of power to eventually subvert them. “Empowered bodies” suggests new modes of enquiry through actions upon spaces that are familiar to our community at Northumbria University, moving beyond the gendered analysis of architecture and its forms of representation, to embrace a vision where subjects, identities and spaces “are understood to be performed and constructed rather than simply represented” (Rendell, 2018). This project prioritises action, in the pedagogical and professional environment, both to make explicit exclusionary spatial practices and to enable forms of more equitable collective appropriation of the built environment